


Don't Waste No Tears On Me

by DestielsDestiny



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Adoption, Army, Big Bang Challenge, Bonding, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge 2016, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Families of Choice, Fluff and Angst, Gen, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Kid Fic, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, M/M, Marine Corps, Marine Dean, No Sam Winchester, Novelist Cas, Parent Castiel, Parent Dean, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Child Abuse, Reunions, Sorry! I love Sam but he's not in this mostly due to timing, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 16:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8453299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: “Remember man, if I don’t make it home, you know what to do.” Cas takes a swig from the bottle of scotch, letting his lips pop from the lip with a smacking noise Dean knows he usually detests in anyone else. “Drink all the beer in the fridge, play all your records loud enough to scratch the finish off, and sell the Impala on Ebay.” Dean pounces on his boyfriend hard enough to make both their ribs crack.“Cas, stop being an asshole!” Cas turns the pounce into a roll, pushing Dean firmly into the grassy dirt that serves as a backyard for their crappy rental. “Then you’ll just have to come back in one piece and make me stop.”The kiss tastes like scotch and sunshine. And more than a little like dirt.Cas closes his eyes, presses their mouths more firmly together, and pretends he’s the only one whose eyes are wet. Pretends that this might not be goodbye.Dean is a US Marine. But he was Castiel's boyfriend first.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: DCBB entry 2016, I own nothing. Inspired by the Tracy Lawrence song, If I don’t make it back.  
> Art by the amazing ismylifejustfantasy  
> Art Link: http://ismylifejustfantasy.tumblr.com/post/152669864427/deancasbigbang-2016title-dont-waste-no-tears-on  
> A big thank you to my amazing artist, and to the DCBB mods! It was a lot of fun!

The funeral is held on September 19, 2014. Three years to the day since they got married, in the same quiet church yard against a backdrop of weeping willows that had seemed idyllic all those years ago, but now whipped as fiercely as the enchanted tree in Ben’s favourite novel against the near gale wind conditions which lent a wild, almost anti-somber aura to the affair of putting what was left of Dean Michael Winchester in the ground. 

What was left was precisely nothing, since that’s all they ever found. 

Cas doesn’t remember much about that day, only remembers snatches of things, little, ridiculous, insignificant things. The shattered thumping sound earth made on the soggy flag Adam places in the grave, the flickers of pain through Cas’ fingers as Ben grips his hand harder than any little boy should be able to. Mostly though, he just remembers the guilt, crushing through everything, over everything. 

Suffocating guilt because Cas found a Sam A. Winchester, junior law partner in a prestigious law firm on a shiny website featuring pictures of oceans and smiling, happy plastic people, three days before Dean was declared MIA. Because Cas had waited, had wanted to surprise Dean instead of grabbing the damn phone and at least trying to tell his husband, to get Dean on the phone right then and there.

Because Cas finally found Dean’s little brother, just in time for Dean to be killed before he would ever know it. 

\---  
They met the first day of junior year, kissed on homecoming night under the stars, walked into senior prom with hands clasped tightly around matching promise rings. 

Cas was the new transfer student, in Lawrence all of two days. Dean was born and raised, captain of the football team, the adored ladies’ man from the wrong side of town. Cas was the awkward loner from the right side. His eyes were piercing blue to Dean’s softer green. 

Dean lived with an absent father and no siblings, Cas with an overbearing mother and more siblings than he could actually count. 

They are a classic high school love story, from start to finish. Until the day they aren’t. 

\--  
Shattering porcelain is just as sharp as shattering glass. Cas thinks he’s always been aware of this on an intellectual level, probably, but he can’t honestly say he’s ever really given it much thought until this moment. 

“Dean!” It’s a ridiculous name, makes it sound like the boy should be wearing jean jackets and slicked back hair and Cas sometimes hates how much his mother’s voice sounds like God in his head. “Dean stop!” Something crashes behind his head, a suspiciously soft crack suggesting the wall just became slightly less sturdy than it was a moment ago. 

Cas has never been the strongest of his near garrison number of siblings, never even though of whether he could take Dean in a fight, but somehow he’s just been nominated to superhero because their world just blew apart, and Cas has no idea how to put it back together. 

“Dean!” Rushing forward with a speed he never quite knew he possessed, Castiel throws all 5’11 of his thin frame around his boyfriend’s flailing limbs, struggling to prevent him from literally throwing himself through the cracked and spiderwebbed front window. 

“Damnit Cas, let me go you sonnavabitch!” Dean swears more than anyone Cas has ever met, not a hard feat granted considering his upbringing, but still, it still takes a lot for the words to hurt less than the vase shards currently making their persistent way further into Cas’ cheek. 

“No!” Dean taught Cas how to be strong, taught him how to stand up for himself. He never imagined he would have to use those skills on Dean. “Killing yourself won’t bring him back!” 

They haven’t talked about it, not during the initial phonecall, not during the identification or the inquest, not during the funeral they didn’t have, or the trip to the garage, or any of the endless nights in between. 

Which might be what led them here, kneeling on shards of bloodstained family heirlooms in the remains of a beaten up rental on the wrong side of the tracks, a broken oak tree standing lone vigil in a silent yard, shards of crumpled metal twisting into its bark like bizarre black branches.

“I don’t want him back Cas! I hated him!” The scream might be more shocking if Cas hasn’t spent the past two years putting together the often literally bleeding pieces of broken boy that John Winchester frequently reduced his oldest son too. He’s always known there was no love lost between the Winchesters. Death was hardly going to change that. Except. 

Surprisingly lucid green eyes swing in his direction, opening bone draw eyelashes just far enough to allow a single tear to slip out and dilute the steady trickle of red making it’s endless way into Cas’ Sunday best. “My dad’s dead Cas.”

Cas has never been a strong person, has always cried at the drop of a hat. His uncle has once dropped a motorcycle helmet on his foot to prove just that point. He’d cried like a baby. He was five at the time. 

He’s seventeen when he stops Dean from killing himself over his own sorry excuse for a parental figure, and for all that his arms feel as fragile as fine porcelain as he gathers Dean firmly to his chest, for all that his voice cracks into a undiscovered level of deepness as he whispers “I know Dean” it the ear that isn’t pressed against his heart, for all that he’s crying more than Dean, for the first time in his life, he feels strong enough to do anything. 

Even save Dean Winchester’s soul. 

\--

“Cas, wait up man! Cas!” Dean has two inches on his boyfriend, but Cas has always been faster, striding nearly two steps for ever one of Dean’s casually artful ambles, a status quo that doesn’t change even when they’re moving quickly. 

Car horns blare in Cas’ ears, doing little to blot out his mother’s echoing words, following his memories of his childhood like a wasps’ nest full of persistent ghosts, “your father was a no good drunk Castiel, don’t you ever forget that.” It took Cas twelve years, one disownment, and one Winchester to finally summon up the courage to ignore those voices enough to make this trip, enough to dig up a battered change of address card from the bottom of his old keepsake box in Dean’s basement, snag his trenchcoat from his mother’s closet while Dean gases up the impala, shimmy down the tree outside his old bedroom window for the last time, and spend the first three weeks of the summer of junior year roadtripping across America to find his father. 

Chuck Shurley left his wife when his youngest son was four, taking two of his children and leaving the rest to his ex-wife. That’s the version Cas has always been told. The version Naomi Novak preached every morning over prayers and cold cereal. 

That’s the version that youngest son had always believed, with the fervent devotion of a child who is desperately trying to earn the love of a parent who wishes they didn’t exist in the first place.

That’s the version Castiel Novak believed, right up until the day kisses his boyfriend at the homecoming dance, three days after his seventeenth birthday, and suddenly he doesn’t have a family anymore. 

A prolonged horn blast is the only warning Cas gets before the solid weight of star quarterback slams him hurriedly out of the path of the greyhound he’s somehow managed to blunder out in front of. 

They both come up gasping, but it takes even Cas a moment to realize his gasps are more from tears than fear. “Naomi was right all along Dean. She was right about everything. My father was a drunk.” A slight hitch enters Cas’ monotone recital at the very last part, choked out towards the rough flannel of Dean’s open checked collar. “Is a drunk.” 

The words sound as much like ash out in the fuel laden air as they did laying in Cas’ mouth, as true as the very real causes of global warming they are currently inhaling by the lung full. 

Steady green eyes flecked with just a smidge of hazel gaze back at him, reflecting almost musically in the passing lights of the freeway traffic that keeps missing their intertwined sneakers by inches. 

“Doesn’t make her right about everything man, just about this. Doesn’t even make her right about your Dad. Man’s probably got his reasons.” It sounds flat even to Cas, who has watched Dean weave so many excuses for John Winchester’s spectacularly bad parenting skills and increasingly overt drinking habits since they started dating that he’s thinking of writing a book. 

They found Chuck in a fleebag of an apartment, buried under miles of paper, and even more galleons of alcohol. Eleven o’clock in the morning, and the man wasn’t even sober enough to recognize his own name, let alone Cas’. 

Castiel recently completed emancipation paperwork, currently works five jobs between him and his underage boyfriend to try and prevent starving to death anymore than they already do, despite having an extremely affluent mother, uncle, and innumerable siblings living less than ten blocks from them. He has no use for another deadbeat parent. 

Three weeks driving, and they stayed all of three minutes, long enough to drop a warn postcard on Chuck’s desk and knock a picture frame off the corner of said desk. 

Thirteen years wondering, and it ends here, on a highway side somewhere between California and Nevada, inches from dying most gruesomely. 

“I don’t need him.” The whisper is lost in the backwash of a passing truck, but Dean’s arms tighten around him nonetheless. “I don’t need his reasons. I didn’t need them then, and I don’t need them now. We don’t need him. I don’t need him! I don’t!”

Dean flips his coat collar up against a passing gust of dirty puddle water, reaches a gentle hand out to caress Cas’ cheek. His mother always said he inherited his father’s eyes. If this trip has proved nothing else, it has proved that to also be true. 

“You’re right man, we don’t need them. We’ve got each other. All we’ll ever need, right here.”

Cas has never wanted to believe something more. 

He doesn’t think about when he became them, about why, about who them is. 

He follows Dean back to the Impala, takes the keys with rock steady hands, and drives them home.  
\--

For three weeks, they are happy. 

Then John Winchester wraps the Impala around the tree in his own front yard, and their lives go to hell. 

Cas gets into Princeton the first week of April, the day after they bury John. Dean enlists in the Marines the next morning.  
\--

Dean takes him out in the Impala the night before he’s due to ship out. They stay out till nearly five, sitting on the grass beside the front tires in some field miles from anywhere, sharing a scotch bottle back and forth. 

They don’t walk much. They don’t kiss even once. 

They definitely don’t say goodbye. 

00

Dear Cas, 

I know I promised not to write, and that we just talked last night for way longer than we should have, but call me a romantic but I just had to do something.  
I miss you okay. So shoot me. Probably shouldn’t write stuff like that right now huh? God I’m bad at this. I bet Sammy got all the smarts in this family, cause they certainly didn’t go my way.  
I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately man-yes, more of a lot than usual. Guy’s got a lot of time to himself to think out here, so sue me!  
Ya’know, I think I’m starting to get the hang of this.  
And there go the guns-don’t go anywhere buddy, I’ll be right back. 

Hey Cas-told you I’d be right back! Man, this is going to be the weirdest ass letter ever.  
Which reminds me, how’s school going? I bet you’re acing everything, you smart asshole. Figures I’d fall for the full package, sexy and brains to boot. Guess that’s why I’ve been thinking about Sammy a lot lately. The brains, not the sexy part, chill dude!  
He’d be fifteen now, his birthday was a couple days ago. Not sure why I suddenly remembered that. Not sure how I ever forgot it really. Not sure how I even remember enough to miss the little squirt.  
But I do miss him man, something fierce.  
And that’s officially it for chick flick moments in this letter.  
I’ll probably talk to you a dozen times before this ever finds it’s way back to you, but the Serg said to do this properly, so what the heck.  
Stay safe man, I’ll see you soon.  
Love, Dean.  
And don’t you dare go anywhere buddy. I’ll be right back, I promise. 

00

Dean’s first tour ends eighteen months after Cas quits Princeton. He takes a taxi to a park, wanders around the duck pond five times, before finally catching a different cab home. 

Cas is sitting at the rickety kitchen table of their latest crappy rental, a small ball of black and white fur attempting to steal the freshly spooned out icecream steadily melting on the cracked formica tabletop. 

Dean grins like a madman, Cas rushing forward, arms coming up. “Dude, you actually bought me a hamster?” Dean’s always been an excellent moment killer. 

Cas huffs in exasperation, the gust of air muffled by Dean’s leather jacket, smuggled into the bottom of his duffle over a year earlier and still shedding desert sand across the tiger striped floor tiles. 

The seventies were truly a decade that lacked even the most basic interior decorating sense. 

The words are muffled by a mouthful of Dean Winchester, but they get the laugh Cas was going for. “His name is Zeplin.” 

They hold each other until the laughter turns to tears, Zeplin happily lapping at their long forgotten bowls. 

00

Cas knows nothing about cars, has even less interest in them. He sees beauty in the Impala for the soul reason that Dean does. He never looks at the car, knows he will see the same bulky expanse of shiny metal. So he looks at Dean as he looks at the Impala, and he sees something beautiful reflected there. 

He cherishes those moments deep in his memory, but he kinda wishes now he’d paid more attention to the actual car herself. Rebuilding something is a lot harder when you can’t even quite remember how big it’s supposed to be. 

“Fucking bastard, idiot, asshole, assbutt!” Cas discovered profanity part way through Dean’s first tour, and his own second term of college. He’s nearly fluent by the time he’s fully restored one door of the Impala, mostly through repetitions of the various things he delights in calling John Winchester, happily dancing on the grave of a dead many equal parts for his own pleasure, how much he knows it would piss off Naomi, and how much he still wants to punch John again for how badly he hurt his son. 

Man couldn’t even die without taking something Dean loved with him. 

Cas swings a crowbar viciously into the trunk before him, studiously ignoring the clock at his elbow and the untouched chemistry finals he’s meant to be taking. He fucking hates Princeton. 

\--

“Remember man, if I don’t make it home, you know what to do.” Cas takes a swig from the bottle of scotch, letting his lips pop from the lip’s seal with a smacking noise Dean knows he usually detests in anyone else. He lets the mouthful sloth around for a while, pretending thoughtfulness. 

“Drink all the beer in the fridge, play all your records loud enough to scratch the finish off, and sell the Impala on Ebay.” Dean pounces on his boyfriend hard enough to make both their ribs crack. Cas’ groan has nothing to do with the weight of a hundred and eighty pounds of Marine pressed muscles impacting with his freshly dropped-out of college soft abs.  
He dangles the bottle out of reach of Dean’s grasping fingers, finally swallowing the now sour mouthful with a satisfying burn, complete with fresh round of lip smacking. 

“Cas, stop being an asshole!” Cas swiftly turns the pounce into a roll, pushing Dean firmly into the grassy dirt that serves as a backyard for their crappy rental. “Then you’ll just have to come back in one piece and make me stop.” 

The kiss tastes like scotch and sunshine. And more than a little like dirt.  
Cas closes his eyes, presses their mouths more firmly together, and pretends he’s the only one whose eyes are wet.

Pretends Dean isn’t about to leave him alone with his sticky typewriter and hungry troop of hamsters, for potentially from now until the end of forever. 

Pretends that this might not be goodbye. 

\--

Castiel kisses Dean Winchester for the first time the night of the homecoming dance, right in front of a fuming John Winchester, alcohol fumes so strong they nearly make him wretch onto Dean’s tongue. It’s hardly the most romantic moment ever, certainly far from the best kiss they will ever exchange, but it will always be there first. 

Dean sees the punch coming, pushes Cas out of the way just in time. The force of it nearly cracks Dean’s head back into the opposite wall, causing John to stumble nearly off the Winchester’s rickety porch. “Fucking fags!” The words are practically spray-painted in the air, but Dean doesn’t have enough time to reel back his fist before a tan and black blur plows into John, propelling him into the neglected petunia bed Mary once planted below the porch swing.  
It’s hardly the hardest punch ever given in the history of Kansas, but it lays John out cold, which is admittedly probably more due to the alcohol than anything else, but whatever. 

Cas swings around to find Dean laying awkwardly where he fell, propped up on one elbow and laughing like an idiot, pointing at the flapping of Cas’ jacket, the beige ends catching wildly in the light spring breeze. “You look like a tax account, Cas!” They hadn’t even consumed any alcohol, but somehow Cas couldn’t help himself. He pushes Dean down onto the cool of the porch deck, the incredibly cheep and incredibly cheesy coat Dean picked out for him as an emancipation house warming gift at the local thrift market because they’re mostly living on beans and tuna this month cushioning both their heads equally. 

Interlocking their fingers carefully, bleeding knuckles matching in the low watt porch lighting, John’s moans creating an interesting counterpoint to the early crickets off to their left somewhere, Cas does the possibly cheesiest thing he’s ever done in his life, and digs something plush and purple out of his pocket. 

“I got you this at that fair last month.” A fuzzy miniature impala hangs pathetically from a tiny key chain less than in inch above Dean’s wheezing chest. The wheezing gets louder, and for a split second Cas thinks he’s being laughed at. Not that he wouldn’t blame Dean. 

Then he looks up. Cas has never seen Dean cry before. 

Watching tears slowly slip down slowly bruising cheeks, hollow from years of pain, fingers interlocking convulsively around a nearly squished plush miniature car, Cas does the only thing he can. Hold on for dear life. 

“Happy Prom, Dean.” They both laugh until their ribs hurt.

It’s not the most romantic night of Cas’ life, but somehow, it forever remains one of the best. 

\--  
They go to Mardi Gras the summer after Cas drops out of Princeton for good, Dean’s recently re-shorn hair brushing bristled patterns into the smooth sand between their naked bodies, the headiness of youth capturing them in a way it somehow never did when they actually were teenagers. 

Cas meets Balthazar first, both of them slightly more than drunk, and slightly less gropey than they are intoxicated. Dean is the one who suggests they all hook up. And it’s wild and fun and crazy and just as fucking hot as such things are always cracked up to be. Balthazar is an amazingly lover, attentive and kind and hot as hell. 

It’s by far the most sizzling three weeks of Cas’ life. It’s also some of the most bittersweet. Dean is once again the one who first suggests it, sandwiched between the two of them one night two weeks in. Suggests that the three of them go home together, give whatever this is a shot at working out. The fact it’s Dean that suggests it is perhaps what makes it the most heartbreaking. Because of all of them, Dean is the cynic, the one who never thinks anything will work out for the best. The one who knows this would never work. 

And they do consider it, for Dean, they both consider it a great deal. And for each other too. Cas loves Dean with a consuming passion that is unquenchable by time or tide. 

They do consider, and they leave four weeks in still considering it. But they leave separately, as a pair and a single, the way they started out. And they keep on considering it, but time passes, Dean reups for another tour, Cas starts his second book, social services finally learn how to use a phonebook, and Balthazar sends them a Christmas postcard three years signed Balth and Anna. And they are happy for him, really. Balthazar always did have a thing for redheads. 

And that’s the end of that. Mostly. 

00

Hey Cas,  
Thought I’d try to sound less like a hallmark card this time around, but this stupid ass paper I scrounged from Martinez is fricking lavender of all things, so try not to be laughing your ass off too hard when you’re reading this, okay buddy!  
I heard from Balthie last night-should we find it concerning his letters arrive faster and more efficiently than our official orders? Guess someone who uses hair gel that fucking expensive can’t be completely without connections-he offered to fly you out here to have a threesome on his father’s private jet. I said no, but only because I want you all to myself the next time I get my hands on you. Balth can learn to lump it and wait his turn like normal people.  
Yeah, I’m checking for flying pigs right about now too.  
And there goes the gunfire. Be right back buddy, so don’t go anywhere. 

00

Lisa Braeden is the second and only time Cas talks Dean into trying a polyamorous relationship, albeit one that actually includes actual sex this time, and consequently lasts significantly shorter than their last attempt

They met her at the same time, down to the minute, at Cas’ first official book launch. Dean had been hours away from shipping out, uniform carefully squirreled away in a bundle under Cas’ old trench in the back of the Impala in deference to the southern location of state, and more particularly to the ridiculousness of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. 

Lisa started making eyes at Dean the moment she sidled up to the two of them with three cocktails balanced awkwardly in slightly sweating hands. Cas thought she was adorable. 

Three hours, five cocktails between him and Dean, and the most awkward attempts at flirting Cas had ever experienced in his life, and they all ended up in bed together. 

And none of them woke up the next morning regretting it exactly, but Lisa was a whole other kind of awkward while sober, darting a few too many looks at Dean’s ripped physique and a few to few to even acknowledge Cas existed. It was enough to let them both know without even asking each other whether they would be asking Lisa back. 

Which Cas probably would have found a whole lot more callous if she’d given any indication of being remotely interested in being asked back. 

And that is the rather abrupt end to that. Mostly. And any attempts on either Cas or Dean’s parts to bring anyone else into their rather dysfunctional relationship. 

Five and a half months later, the phone rings. It’s Lisa. 

00

Ben is undoubtedly Dean’s son, from his wispy blond curls to his slightly hazel green eyes that look hauntingly like the old, folded picture that never leaves Dean’s wallet of a smiling blond woman holding an equally smiling Dean, both gazing raptly at a gurgling baby Sammy. 

There are many times in the course of knowing Dean that Cas wants to set that picture on fire. 

It’s safely tucked against his heart the morning he takes Ben to meet his grandmother for the first time, as lovingly preserved as it was the day Dean first showed it to him. 

He and Dean hadn’t even been in a domestic partnership when Ben was born, were nothing official to each other in deference to Dean’s career. 

Which had never stung quite so much as it did the day Lisa Braeden tearfully announced that she wasn’t ready to be a mother, and that she wanted Dean to raise their son. While never once so much as making eye contact with Cas, which was no mean feat considering he was the one holding Ben, Dean’s arms securely wrapped around both him and the baby in his arms. 

It had never stung quite so much, because it meant that no matter what their feelings on the matter, Lisa was completely right about exactly whose son Ben was, in the eyes of the law at least. 

Cas never quite gets over the fact that his first thought on learning that his husband has been killed in action in Afghanistan is one of sheer relief, because it’s 2014, and they’ve been married since the Fall after DADT was repealed.

Because at least he won’t lose their son too. 

00

Ben is six the first time Cas hears the name John Winchester since the turn of the Millennium.

They’re running late to Ben’s soccer game, balls literally bouncing off the walls while Dean rushed around looking for the high zoom camera Cas bought him for Christmas, ignoring his husband’s good natured jibes of “Just use your cell phone Dean!” 

The hall phone rings during Dean’s second pass through the living room, and consequently it is Cas that picks up the receiver. Cas that says, “Winchester residence, may I ask who is calling please?” Dean always says he sounds like a greeting card. 

And it is Cas who drops the phone on the floor hard enough to crack the casing, but startlingly not hard enough to break the phone, which continues to squawk alarmingly while Dean and Ben clamour around Cas, firing questions like the larger and smaller versions of each other they often are. 

It’s Dean’s eyes, earnest and warm and green and blissfully content for the first time in years, that finally causes the tears pressing at Cas’ eyelids to fall down his cheeks, Dean’s fingers coming up to stroke his face in time to catch all but one of them. 

But it is the same eyes shining out of Ben’s trusting face, the words, “Are you okay, Papa?” ringing in the hall that makes Cas pick up the phone, pressing it into Dean’s hand while murmuring, “I’ll go call the Coach, let them know we’ll be late.” 

He’s never felt quite so much like a coward as he does in the time it takes him to walk into their kitchen. 

Their relationship barely survived John Winchester the first time around. Cas isn’t sure if he’s brave enough to face another of the man’s messes. 

00

Adam arrives in their lives a month after the entirely missed soccer game. Unfortunately, Ben is more than old enough to make the connection between those two events. 

Equally unfortunately, Adam is just as much a miniature clone of John Winchester as Cas suspects a sullen, green hair sporting thirteen-year-old could be. 

It takes a lot of black eyes before the two boys can so much as stand to be in the same room. Dean is on an extended leave at the time, which is one of the only reasons Cas doesn’t just break down one night and say what they’ve both been thinking since they got that damn phone call. They can’t do this. 

Except Naomi was no better than John Winchester at wanting her own children, much less standing by them, and three months’ tick by until the afternoon Ben comes home with yet another black eye, his nosy slightly bloody. 

Adam storms by holding swollen knuckles while Cas is fishing frozen pees out of the freezer.  
He’s half way to slamming the pees on the counter, blocking Adam’s escape to his room when Ben blurts out, “Dad, Adam’s the coolest brother ever!” 

No part of that sentence was something Cas ever expected to find coming out of his son’s mouth. 

But that somehow pales in comparison to the look of sheer incredulity Adam Milligan’s green eyes have in them as they regard the beaming, bloody younger boy. 

Cas has seen that look a hundred times before, the one that says the wearer can’t quite believe somebody would ever stand up for him, would ever think anything he did was worthy of praise. 

Even when they’re willing to take on the world, or in this case the local contingent of school bullies, to protect their family. 

Cas lets his arm slacken to carefully drape around Adam’s thin shoulders, guiding his newest charge towards the table and the bag of frozen carrots waiting there. The green eyes remain heartbreakingly wide the entire time. 

Cas will never quite forget that Adam is a Winchester through and through. But he also never lets himself forget that that is far from a bad thing. 

00

Tears flowed down Cas’ face, his sides splitting with intense spasms, his whole body shaking so hard that his hands ripped the paper clutched between them above the kitchen table top.

“Dad?” It had taken Adam over a year to exchange more than a sentence with Cas, who never really pressed the issue because Adam was a sophomore from Texas and he really couldn’t blame the kid anyway considering the circumstances, whatever his reasons. Dean’s last leave had unsurprisingly provided the thaw in the ice field that had become their lives, just as Cas always knew it would. Dean Winchester could make anyone love him. 

It was a surprise to no one but Dean that his little brother was no exception to that rule, despite being the offspring of the only actual exception to said rule.

Adam called John just that, John. The man really was the biggest idiot Cas had ever met, including Uriel and Zachariah. 

“Dad!” Okay, so maybe politeness hadn’t entered the equation entirely, but Cas would take what he could get right now. Wiping his carelessly with his sleeve, he squashed the letter into one hand, ruffling Adam’s hair with the other as he stood to regard the lanky teen. 

“What is it kiddo?” Adam didn’t even call him Dean, which Cas would have counted as a win except for finally registering the look on their son’s face. 

“There’s some people at the door.” Cas once heard someone describe words as bullets. He hadn’t gotten it at the time. He somehow gets it now, because somehow, that’s all it takes for him to just know. 

“Watch your brother. Stay here!” The closest Cas has ever gotten to military combat was miles off mortar fire over a video chat last Easter, but ten odd years living with a marine was more than enough to make Cas downright officer material when he wanted to be. 

It doesn’t make opening the door to the blue and white figures of stone he knows he’ll find there any easier.

It doesn’t make the crumbled remains of a letter fluttering from his fingers onto the hard walk sound any less like a death knell when they land, light as a feather. 

Dear Cas,  
If this letter seems odd, and if it doesn’t I’ll have to ask Ben what you’ve been secretly smoking you old dog, you can totally blame the whole thing on Benny. Cause I totally do man, so it’s all good. He’s a tough blood sucka. Seriously, writing with pen and paper man? Fuck that, I just got you more minutes for Christmas. But apparently it’s more romantic or some shit,  
so here goes nothing. 

We found a stray kitten yesterday. Damnest thing, crawled out of this burnt out house mewling loud enough to alert every hostile in a ten mile radius, rubbed it’s nose against my semi-automatic like it hadn’t a care in a world. Pretty little scrap of a thing, ugly as fuck really, but kinda cute. Has your eyes. Think I’m gonna call it Cassy. 

I’ll finish this latter. Don’t go anywhere man. I’ll be home soon. I promise.

00

It takes Cas nearly a year to work up the courage to phone the number he finds at the bottom Dean’s bottom desk drawer, the one he’s kept locked since he dragged the ugly monstrosity home from a garage sale a couple years and several leaves back. It’s a true eye sore in every sense of the meaning, complete with cracked drawers and red plaid worktop. Cas uses it for everything these days. 

The number nearly rings out before finally clicking over, a posh British accent drolling laconically over the receiver into Cas’ moist ear. He laughs for long enough that Balthazar nearly hangs up on him, something which rapidly changes the moment he explains who he is. 

He hangs up the phone nearly an hour later, just as much a widower as he was when he dialed, but even he can’t deny he feels a whole lot better than he has in a very long time. 

Coincidence or not, it takes Cas nearly a year to work up the courage to visit Dean’s grave as well. It’s a simple affair, a slightly engraved white cross in a field of ubiquitous white markers extolling the virtues the love of his life fought and died for. 

He stands there for nearly an hour, watching the sky progress rapidly from grey to stormy to pouring. It’s back to grey before he works up the courage to tear his gaze downwards and looks at the earth. If someone was around taking pictures in a gale, Cas would still be several years too late to be saying fuck you to the US government by airing his grief for the world to see, but he isn’t sure why else he’s standing there, so maybe he’s just unfashionably late at these things. 

The last movie they ever watched together was Jerry Maguire. It took Cas nearly three months of bribery, wheedling, and apple pie to finally convince Dean to watch it, and he stoically endures it with much catcalling for nearly the entire run time, right up until Tom Cruise crashes into a living room of ladies epitomizing nineties fashion sense, and that right there was the reason Cas wanted Dean to watch it at all. 

Dean had always said Cas had him at hello. 

So maybe it stands to reason that Cas can never quite bring himself to say goodbye.

\--

Cas’ fourth book is published six months after Dean is declared KIA in Afghanistan. He uses the same pen name he always has, the same semi-anonymous cover art and carefully concealed author bio designed specifically to avoid the kind of careful, pouching scrutiny his former uncle Zachariah presumably still gives to any new New York Times Best-Seller list authors. 

He only changes one thing. He includes a dedication. 

His father shows up on his doorstep a week later. 

\--  
It had been nearly fifteen years since Cas had laid eyes on Chuck Shurley, but his delayed ability to recognize the clean shaven, earnest face staring back at him with soulful blue eyes has far more to do with the shining sobriety writ large across every inch of his father’s casual but clean appearance. 

Cas seriously considers slamming the door in his face anyway. Probably would have, except his latest attempt to get up the courage to dial the help line at Singer, Winchester, and Singer and ask to speak to Sam Winchester ended exactly the same way the last five attempts before that had. A cold sweat and a dial tone. And Cas has a couple of kids with no one in the world except a dead father and a hack writer for their only living parent. 

Cas doesn’t want his kids to grow up the way he and Dean did. Alone. So just like that, he swings the door wider, and lets Chuck back into his life. He ignores the little voice inside his head that sounds suspiciously like Dean. Man probably had his reasons.

As it turns out, Dean is still the wisest person he’s ever met. 

\--  
“So, Castiel…how’ve you been doing?” Cas strongly considers throwing something at Chuck’s head. Or throwing his father out. But Adam has actually removed his ever present earbuds for the first time in three months, even if his eyes are still firmly glued on his smart phone, so Cas contents himself with a suitably snippy rebuttal. 

“It’s Cas.” He apparently got his way with words from his father, if their combined current net worth’s are anything to go by, so he feels more than justified in thinking it serves Chuck right.

He hasn’t let anyone call him Castiel since Naomi excommunicated him on his sixteenth birthday. He’s not about to start down that road again with another parent. 

Except his father really does have it eyes. Wide blue orbs widen with an earnest sadness that Cas sees in the mirror reflected in the dim backlight of his laptop every night, the closest he gets to a mirror these days. 

He suspects somewhere Dean is laughing his ass off to the tune of “payback’s a bitch dude!”

“Okay, Cas. How are you, son?” And throwing him out is back on the table. It’s not even the question so much, however ludicrous, however obtuse. If fact, Cas finds some comfort in the sheer familiarity of everything about the man in front of him, from his startling blue eyes to his tacky taste in clothes to his slightly cringe-worthy conversational skills. 

Dean would have loved knowing there were more bits of Cas out there in the world, being all awkward and awesome. Cas sometimes wonders if he should see a mental health professional for the voices in his head. Then he remembers the real Dean is never coming back, so he might as well take what he can get. 

Chuck is still sitting there, twitching patiently, if such a thing is possible. His hands play uselessly in his lap, Cas’ hospitality extending as far as offering his father a perch on the couch and no further. “Son?” And just like that, Cas’ patience snaps. 

He hates the word son. John had never called Dean by his name, never called him anything but that one, dismissive word. Like it made everything he ever put Dean through, put them through, all fine and dandy and A-Okay. Dean used to joke that Cas has more issues with his Dad than Dean did. He wasn’t wrong. Cas is saving that one for that shrink he’ll probably never go see. 

Chuck is finally starting to look uncomfortable when Cas finally starts talking, carefully modulating his ranting to remain within let’s not scare the children levels. “How am I? Really?! I don’t see you for fourteen years, and that’s the best you can do, Chuck?!” Cas is almost proud how much he makes his father’s name sound like an insult. 

“My mother kicked me out twenty years ago for holding hands with my boyfriend in church, my uncle has sued me on three separate occasions for goodness only knows what, I spent my teenage years either praying for forgiveness for the sin of homosexuality, or enough food to eat because my father is a cowardly alcoholic who ran out on his family when I was six, and three months ago I buried a pine box which I somehow had to explain to our eight year old did not in fact contain his father’s earthly remains, because no one could find anything in the desert he died in to bring back home to bury. Other than that I’m doing great. How about you, Dad?”

Something slightly louder than a pin drops to the floor, and Cas vaguely reminds himself to put yet another set of portable headphones on the shopping list while he slowly turns towards his eldest son with something not unlike dread pooling in his stomach. How could he be so stupid as to forget Adam was in the room. 

Adam’s slightly hazel eyes are shimmering suspiciously in the afternoon light, his gaze fixed on Cas’ face for the first time since that knock on the door, all those months ago. Before he can so much as open his mouth however, a quiet yet forceful voice echoes around the kitchen, answering the question he only asked out of spiteful bitterness, caring less than nothing about an answer he thought he’d never receive. 

“Well, my abusive ex-wife kicked me out of my own house along with our two youngest children when they were diagnosed with Leukemia at the age of three, then proceeded to contact me the day after their funeral, which she did not attend, to inform me that I was never to contact our three surviving children. I spent nearly two decades drinking my way through whatever money I made writing books with characters named after my aforementioned children, and the one and only time one of the kids I had left took the trouble of looking me up, I was too wasted to recognize my own son’s name, never mind remember his face. Other than that, I’ve been great too. Thanks for asking son.”

Adam’s eyes have slid from Cas’ rapidly paling face to Chuck’s dark red one during the course of that rather startling counter rant, and they rapidly slide back and forth a few more times in the space of a few seconds. Seconds Cas spends thanking every divinity he can think of that Ben is currently over at a sleep over with Benny’s kids. 

Adam’s eyes come to rest on Cas’ paper white complexion, before narrowing into an alarming approximation of his long deceased birth father, ever inch of that weighted glare aimed firmly at Chuck. “You’re an Ass.” It’s enunciated with more force than a fourteen-year-old should really be able to manage, an absolute statement of fact rather than a hastily crafted insult. Adam sometimes reminds Cas of John so much he nearly flinches. Right then, he just looks like Dean. 

Chuck barely blinks an eyelash at his sort of grandson. “I’ve been reliably informed that it runs in families, kiddo.” And then he actually winks. Honest to god, snaps one reddish lashed eyelid down and back up in a rapid flutter. 

Cas holds his breath for a moment, watching Adam flick his eyes to take in the shade of blue Cas shares with his father once more. As sapphire as the stars Dean had once said, slightly more than a little drunk. Still, he was perfectly correct in the fact that their eyes are rather unusual. And nearly unique. 

And then Cas’ jaw drops open, as the foreign sounds of his eldest son’s giggles fill the entire room, echoing off every wall like peels of bells in a long derelict chapel. 

Cas invites Chuck to stay to dinner. 

And that night, the door freshly closed behind Ben’s bouncing form, happy and refreshed as he’s been in months, when their youngest skitters to a stop in the kitchen doorway, eyeing Chuck’s hunched, tea guzzling form with more distrust than any child who isn’t the offspring of Dean Winchester would ever be capable of showing, Cas simple walks calmly over and puts an arm around his son’s shoulders, guiding him towards the rather heated game of Go Fish that Adam has insisted on playing with Chuck, for reasons best known only to him. 

And when Ben looks up at Cas from hazel flecked green eyes, his piping voice asking innocently, “Who’s this, Dad?” Well, there really is only one thing left for Cas to say. 

“This is your grandpa Kiddo.” 

00

“And then the brave, supercilious princess Anna turned to her brother Castel and declared in a high, haughty tone dripping with royalty and privilege, “Today is the day we will bring down the city laws, and reclaim what was stolen from us!” Chuck’s voice is rough from years of scotch wearing away at his vocal cords, but Ben and Adam still insist he tells stories way better than Cas. 

Their father was too busy protesting that they never wanted to listen to his books to comment that they are all much too old for bedtime stories. 

An argument that promptly becomes a moot point the day Sammy becomes a permanent member of their household. 

Dean had included a picture of the little boy in his last letter, the one Cas received after his death, the one he keeps carefully folded in his wallet, creased enough times to wear through in the center. They had been talking about adopting, it being Dean’s last tour and all. 

It took Cas six months to talk the agency into considering him as a single parent. He feels slightly encouraged by the fact it was easier for a couple to adopt, even a gay one, than a single man with two healthy, happy children. He’s not sure why. 

Cas has never done anything about that picture frozen in his computer’s search bar, a starched shirt brushed with ridiculously long hair, hazel eyes almost light enough to look green in the artificial light. He’s not that brave, not without Dean. 

But from the moment he saw the name at the top of that slightly sand stained information sheet, even in the haze of grief he moved through after the funeral, even if it took nearly two years to get the paperwork pushed through and add a member to their shortened family, he knew he couldn’t deny them all a chance to have a Sammy in their lives once again. 

00

Cas is pretty sure the people who organized this event made up the award for publicity, but the boys were too darn excited, Chuck too darn bursting with pride for Cas to be able to resist that many puppy dog eyes. 

It was this or buy an actual puppy. 

Cas hadn’t realized when he made that decision that he was trading puppy puddles for public speaking. If he had, he probably would have chosen the puddles. 

A sea of faces stare out at him, the air seeming to suck right out of the rather gaudy ballroom. Cas clears his throat for about the millionth time. Someone coughs awkwardly. 

A sudden, high pitched shout breaks the ghastly silence. “Go give ‘em hell Daddy!”

Cas feels his face flush an even deeper red, his veins throbbing painfully as his eyes are drawn inexorably to the far side of the room, where his father is attempting too quiet down the squirming, floppy haired preschooler dressed in what was once a freshly pressed suit. 

The stale air stirs at Cas’ shoulder, Sammy’s loud whispers slowly hushed by Chuck’s gentle chastisement. Come on man, you’ve got this. 

Cas straightens his shoulders. His trench coat squeaks somewhat alarmingly. 

“I am not entirely sure what the name of this award is, nor why I am the one receiving it. However, since you are all assembled here, I suppose I am obligated to say a few words.” No one laughs. Chuck flashes him two thumps up, three pairs of increasingly smaller hands quickly mirroring him. 

Cas feels something brush his shoulder. “The first person who ever read a single word I had written was my husband. He took forever to finish it, spent the entire afternoon of our first anniversary grinning like a loon at my meager scribbling. I’ll never forget what he said after he was done. He looked me straight in the eye, paused for a significant amount of time, and asked what was for dinner.” 

Slightly uncertain laughter smatters out through the room. Cas feels his face lose some of its redness. His trench coat doesn’t feel quite as hot anymore. 

“I started writing because my father was a writer, and I wanted to prove I was nothing like him.” Across the myriad of confused faces, Chuck blinks rapidly. Cas lets himself smile back. 

“I kept writing because it made my husband smile.” The air brushes Cas’ cheek, and for just a moment, it almost seems to pause long enough to be a caress. 

Cas feels tears prick his eyes. He closes them for a moment, something green catching the edge of his vision as he does so. 

He hears the room shift uncomfortably. Cas doubts he’ll be winning this award again, whatever it is called. 

Cas clears his throat, his eyes sliding open as tears spill out. He misses Dean. 

His choked out “thank you” only gets a smattering of applause, but Cas is beyond caring by that time he makes it back across the room, a slightly disgruntled moderator replacing him on the podium. 

Chuck is waiting with arms tentatively extended, and for the first time in thirty years, Cas lets himself fall into his father’s embrace. 

Part of him never quite wants to let go. 

He hopes wherever Dean is, he is smiling. 

00

Cas isn’t sure how long he stares at the doorbell. Long enough that at least two curtains have twitched in the house next door, but not long enough for anyone to have called the police so Cas figures he probably has about five more minutes before he has to worry too seriously about being arrested. It’s a very snarky thought, sort of comes out of nowhere, and he isn’t really sure what to do with it. 

It’s a very Dean thought. That doesn’t choke him up as much as it used to. He’s not sure if that’s good or bad or something else entirely. 

“Daddy, is the doorbell scary?” Cas tilts his head gently to the right and down roughly three inches. It used to be two. Ben’s getting so tall. And that totally chokes him up a bit, enough that his response sounds rather like sandpaper on gravel. It’s totally a Dean thing to think. 

“No baby boy, Daddy’s just being a bit of a wimp.” Ben started calling him Daddy a week after he started grade two, and for all that it still makes Adam of all people look up like he expects Dean to walk through the door any minute, Cas couldn’t deny the green eyed little boy anything in the world in those days. Still can’t most days. “You’re not a wimp Daddy, angels aren’t scared of anything!” Ben’s voice is bell clear on the best of days, and it never ceases to pierce the remaining pieces of Cas’ heart. 

Cas finished reading the Deathly Hallows to Adam in October, and the sophomore had promptly started refusing to call him anything but Sev. Cas stubbornly refuses to get the connection.

The appearance of what distinctly resembles binoculars around the edge of a twitching curtain in the corner of his eye pulls Cas back to the present, to the little boy firmly gripping his fingers and the chrome doorbell staring dispassionately back at eyelevel. 

Dean used to call Cas a big softie, starting from the moment Cas punched John Winchester in the nose and gave Dean an Impala plushy in the space of less than five minutes. Like most things in Cas’ life, Dean Winchester always called things pretty much exactly the way they are. 

Because Cas swore, when he was sixteen and bleeding on the curb of his childhood home, that he would never break another mother’s heart. And he knows that if he presses that doorbell, whatever the eventual outcome that is precisely what will happen. 

He pushes it anyway. Because if Dean taught him anything, it was that somethings are worth the heartbreak. Because he’s standing beside a walking replica of his dead husband, and that’s a gift he would be beyond selfish not to share with some of the only other people in the universe who ever loved Dean Winchester. 

Because they spent the majority of their lives together looking for the people currently residing between the ordinary suburban walls before his eyes, and Cas will be damned if he doesn’t see this through now, after everything. 

Mostly though, he presses that honest to goodness bright fuscia ringer, holding it down for a good three rings before snatching his hand back as if the colour might have leeched out onto his nails, because, well, mostly he presses it because it’s what Dean would have wanted. 

Dean always wanted Cas to meet Mary Winchester. Had always wanted to introduce his mother to the love of his life. 

And as the elegant magenta door swings open on well oiled hinges, as a pretty face framed by torrents of blond-grey curls peers out at him, gaze sweeping over Cas before pausing for a beat too long on Ben, as bright green eyes with the barest hint of hazel flecks lock with Cas’ swimming blue irises, as Cas feels what’s left of his own heart begin to crack and quiver, he slowly breathes out and lets himself begin to smile for the first time in what feels like decades, but is somehow only months, not even years yet. 

And really, at this point, for all that the gaping silence hangs in the air like an unacknowledged wraith of grief and loss, one that is shuffling its feet and anxiously stumbling over something like, “Ah, Cas…this is Mom, I mean Mary, my mother. Mom, this is my-er, this is Cas”, there really was only one thing he could ever say in this moment. 

“Hello Mary.”

\-- 

“Hey Cas, do you ever think about your dad?” A screech fills the air as industrious fingers jam haphazardly into the heavy typewriter keys in shock. 

Cas raises his piercing blue eyes from his work, the shredded remains of his latest bad draft of his fourth novel that will probably become a bestseller anyway because human beings have minds made up of mostly drivel languishing, unnoticed and unimportant in comparison to the innocent figure of Cas’ husband, currently sprawled across the embroidered sofa opposite the writing desk. 

Dean’s green eyes only look that guileless when he’s trying too hard. “What?!” The inquiry is harsh with repressed gravel. Dean winces in sympathy for Cas’ throat, and his own ears. 

“No need to get worked up man, it was just a question.” Cas sucks in a breath, then carefully holds it until his face nearly turns blue. The typewriter gives a sad little whine and crunches ominously. Cas turns bluer. 

It’s been nearly a decade since their ill-fated trip to find Chuck. Cas has tried very hard not to think about the man since. Cas feels his throat close slightly. “Dean…” He does nothing to disguise the hurt in his voice. 

Dean has the grace to look contrite. “I’m sorry man, I shouldn’t have said anything, it’s just…” Cas follows Dean’s gaze towards the calendar on the wall, and bites back a curse. 

He often looses track of time when he’s writing, but forgetting this day should be impossible for them both. Apparently not. 

Cas meets Dean half way, their lips colliding in a desperate kiss, sorrys poised on both their tongues. 

They end up giggling instead. 

Neither of them mentions John Winchester.

00

Cas sends Dean a forwarded copy of his latest book, the same as he has with all the others. He never finds out whether Dean received this last one. 

He never finds out if Dean ever got to open the cover, and read what was written on the dedication page. That will always haunt Cas. 

 

For Dean, and our boys. 

And for Chuck, who I am finally ready to allow might have had his reasons. 

 

00

 

Cheering for the Home Team  
by  
Castiel Winchester  
Excerpt from chapter 1  
He notices the green-eyed boy the first day of school, a new town fresh under his squeaky white shoes. Notices the way he moves like a graceful tiger, the way he protects his little brother with the ferociousness of a lion. 

It takes him two months to work up the courage to ask him out. 

Cas fully expects to be knocked down for his trouble, asking out the star quarterback in the middle of the lunch room, three days before the big game. But that’s not what happens. 

 

“Hello Dean.” Sometimes, Castiel wishes his voice would crack just a little, maybe squeak occasionally, anything but broadcast like a chest deep foghorn. Somewhere, he’s sure a pin just dropped on the dirty linoleum of the cafeteria. Green eyes study him steadily, assessing, and what the heck was he thinking, speaking to the hottest guy in school, he doesn’t stand a chance, he’s gonna get eaten and Uriel will joyfully jump on the pieces that are left and-

“Hey Cas.” 

Dean always had him at hello, right from the very first moment. 

00  
Iraq-2017  
It was quiet. Too quiet. Nothing had been moving for at least the last twenty minutes, nay a creature stirred, setting the squad leader’s teeth on edge. They’d been out on patrol for nearly an hour already, but they hadn’t gone nearly far enough for hostiles to be expected. If insurgents had breached this far…Raising a fist, he called a halt, carefully considering the surrounding terrain. 

Nothing. Not even a whisper of wind. There was no discernable threat yet none of them could shake the feeling of something…

Crash! Six guns swung around in near perfect unison, coming to bear squarely on the burnt out doorway of the old school about 100 yards to their right. The Sergeant hesitated, debating the merits of taking cover vs advancing, because hostiles would have started shooting by now. 

A figure abruptly emerged from the gloom of the building’s husk, stumbling wildly and falling to a knee in the hot afternoon sand. Guns click ready, fingers poised but not pressed, waiting. 

Somewhere, a pin drops. So does the figure, hitting the sand face first with an oddly loud thump. 

They approach with caution, way too experienced to rush, nowhere near cynical enough to walk away. They’re within three feet of the still motionless figure when they all realize, as pretty much one comprehensive unit, that the rags the dangerously emaciated figure is wearing were fatigues at some point in a previous life. American fatigues. 

To their credit, urgency is still rather outweighed by caution, but they at least edge close enough to carefully, carefully roll the unresponsive figure out of the direct sun. As the team medic’s fingers brush the man’s upper arm, a slack pair of eyes slowly opens a sliver, a parched moan escaping a lightly freckled face, cheeks hollow enough to look alien.

The eyes are barely cracked, and the sun is so bright that everything is washed out in an off-white overtone and the whole team is wearing desert issue shades, but somehow, the slightest flash of green peeking out from slitted lids is still unmistakable, plain as day for all the world to see. 

Parched lips part for the briefest whisper of a breath, the word like a prayer, lost in the desert wind before it was ever really there. 

Only the point man is close enough to hear it, for all that they’re all slowly abandoning caution and creeping closer at a slightly faster crawl in deference to the man’s obviously dire state, and she will always remember thinking it was the oddest prayer she’d ever heard, even out there, in that particular slice of hell on earth. 

“Cas…”

She will always regret her failure to discover if that prayer was ever answered.


End file.
